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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

I've just chosen to install Sabayon over my ubuntu installation. But I'm getting worried about the free space on my / partition (about 8 GB). Formely, I had plenty of space on this for kubuntu. But when installing some updates, the free space is shrinking very fast. After installation, I got 2gb left. After going through some updates, I only have 500 mb left and still have to go through some updates. With ubuntu, I did not need so much HD space.

Now, I'm wondering how big the / partition needs to be for sabayon installation. Also, is there a difference between CD en DVD version (I installed the DVD version, I chose not to keep the other language files so I assume this may not be a problem).

Also, if I need to make the partition bigger, how should I handle it? Does using the built-in partition manager has some possible dangers in it?

It is a dual-boot with two partitions for windows XP, after this is the SWAP-file (sda5), then root partition (sda6) and then home partition (sda7) . So I'd guess I have to shrink the home partition or the swap file plus the last partition of windows XP? How big does the swap file actually needs to be? I have 1,5 gb for 1gb of ram. Can I make this smaller?

My plan is to shrink the D-partition of windows (more than 30gb left), and move my swap and / partition to the freed space. I want to do this with gparted live cdrom as the disks need to be unmounted. When doing so, it gives me a warning when pointing a new size to my / partition. It states that moving the /boot directory of linux will make this partition unbootable. Now, how can I resize my partition without messing things up? Or can I continue with gparted and re-install sabayon anew when it is repartitioned?

You can go the route of re-installing Sabayon (since your home directories are on another partition) but you really just need to reinstall (or restore) your grub bootloader.

My gParted live CD has the Super Grub loader on it as one of the start-up options but if yours doesn't, you can download it herehttp://linux.softpedia.com/dyn-postd...p=8071&t=0&i=1. Download the grub disk, burn the iso file to a CD and then you can boot from your new Super Grub disk. It has a number of painless, automated repair options that will just require you to answer a few easy questions.

If you're a brave, intrepid soul and you know where your Linux partitions are, you can restore your bootloader from the command line with the following steps:

Boot from a live CD, open a terminal. Check your filesystem with the command

Quote:

fsck.ext2 /dev/sdX9 <replace the X9 with the letter and number of your partition. For example, if your Sabayon is on the sda4>

Restore the ext2/ext3 filesystem parameters by entering the following:

Right now I'm repartitioning, but gparted is stuck on X % for two hours now. Shrinking my windows D: partition and enlarging linux partition went fine, but it busy now with enlarging my / partition for two hours without any progress (at the beginning, it stated it would last for only 10 minutes). So I'm guessing something went wrong, I wanted to cancel it but a message told me that this may cause severe file system damage. So, what are my options now? And what does this damage mean? I can live with the loss of data since I can re-install linux, or does this mean physical damage to my HD?

There is a tweak you may want to apply in order to save space. By default, Sabayon stores update files in its own configuration directories, for the sake of reliability and speed. However, this will end up with a stronger storage space request. You can prevent this behavior by editing your

/etc/entropy/client.conf

setting the option packages-autoprune-days to few days. Also consider the possibility to clean up manually calling "equo cleanup". It could save a lot of space.